Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us (23 page)

Con sat perched on the edge of the couch, staring into space. Motti was glad she wasn’t hearing this.

‘Don’t mistake me, Nathaniel,’ Samraj continued. ‘You know I have always admired your audacity and daring. Why else would I have employed you so many
times in the past to acquire my little treasures?’ He raised an eyebrow, and she smiled seductively, turning Motti’s stomach. ‘Aside from
that
reason, of course. I can see how such a bold enterprise must have seemed irresistible to you.’ The smile faded. ‘But while I did not presume to underestimate your greed and ambition … you underestimated
me
.’

‘I didn’t suspect that Yianna was working for you,’ Coldhardt admitted. He cast a measured look at the sullen, sickly girl. ‘Why? Why turn against your own father?’

‘He is a monster,’ Yianna said quietly. ‘He does not love me. All he sees in me is the ghost of my mother.
That
is what he wishes to preserve.’

Samraj nodded, her face the picture of sympathetic concern. ‘He is a fool not to love you for who you are.’

‘I can understand it,’ said Motti darkly.

‘You know nothing.’ Yianna stared at him, her hooded eyes agleam. ‘No one can replace my mother in his memory. Together, they made me. I am their legacy, his dearest possession. He …’ She faltered, put a hand to her cheek. ‘He set a surgeon to my face when I was only ten, so I would look more like her … The clothes he dressed me in were copies of her old clothes.’ She stared into space, shaking her head, bewildered. ‘Nothing is mine. Nothing is about Yianna. And it should be. That is only fair, isn’t it?’ She snarled at Motti. ‘Well, isn’t it?’

Motti said nothing, wondering if this was what Tye might have become if she hadn’t left her father so young: bitter, emotionally retarded, twisted as all hell.

‘Do not torment yourself, my dear,’ said Samraj softly. But Motti saw no sympathy in the woman’s glittering eyes. She merely found the outburst distasteful.

Still Yianna’s glare was on Motti. ‘He chops up his snakes and makes promises and vows to find the secret of the Amrita, to heal me and make me strong. So he can go on controlling me for ever.’ He looked away. ‘But Samraj will have the secret before him. She will share it with me. She will share her
life
with me. And we shall leave my father with nothing.’

Coldhardt gave her his wintry smile. ‘Samraj and Demnos are old lovers and older rivals. Do you truly believe she acts for your sake?’

Yianna nodded firmly.

‘Of course I do. I have seen what the old fool has done to her over the years. I care for her as I would my own child. I’m like you, Nathaniel.’ Samraj smiled benignly at Motti and Con, who was still staring vacantly into space. ‘We both take injured, unloved little things and give them something to strive for, to believe in …We teach them our own values.’

Motti felt his cheeks burning. He willed Coldhardt to say something, to shout her down, to let loose his icy temper and trash the place. But he only stood there, impassive. He didn’t contradict her.

‘Is that what you’ve done with the Cult of Ophiuchus – taught them your values?’ he said at length, changing the subject. ‘I understood they followed only their illustrious, long-living leader. And yet you seem to have them running about for you like errand boys.’

‘Only Hela is a true adept of the cult,’ Samraj corrected
him. ‘The others are simply hired muscle. The best that money can buy, naturally.’

‘She’s got a load more of those tattooed creeps over at the Serpens labs,’ Motti told Coldhardt. ‘A ton of wires and tubes sticking out of them – she’s using them in some kind of experiment.’

‘Hela and I are united in our vision to restore the cult of Ophiuchus to former glories,’ said Samraj slyly. ‘So yes, she is assisting Yianna and me in one way, while her brethren aid me in another.’ She stalked slowly forward towards Coldhardt. ‘You never understood, did you, Nathaniel? You skulked around my house in the dead of night, and yes, you found my precious scraps of paper, the clues and riddles relating to Ophiuchus and his great secret. I knew what you were up to, and I was prepared to tolerate your curiosity – after all, it was you who stole several of those relics for me in the first place.’ She shook her head, mock-chiding him. ‘But when I told you I kept the most precious manuscripts of all in my labs, I didn’t mean more pieces of parchment.’

Coldhardt considered, then smiled. ‘You spoke in metaphor. How pretty of you.’

She nodded. ‘I was speaking of the real legacy that Ophiuchus left behind. A manuscript written in chemical bases – the
genome
of the cultists. Their every gene and chromosome, given up for me to map and study.’

‘Why?’ Motti demanded.

‘Over the passing centuries, these adepts of Ophiuchus have lived in small, isolated groups,’ Samraj told him, ‘maintaining a strict, rarefied diet,
breeding selectively. As a result they are not mere mongrels like us, walking bags of contaminated chemicals. They are genetically pure. Their bodies yield up proofs of an impossibly long life – some of them, many hundreds of years.’

‘That’s not true immortality,’ said Coldhardt quietly.

‘Far from it,’ Samraj concurred. ‘Today’s world is polluted and poisoned – the food we eat, the soil we tread, the air we breathe. And the cultists’ unique genetic make-up makes them extremely vulnerable to this pollution.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Motti challenged her. ‘That the stuff you need to make the Amrita ain’t pure enough no more?’

She gave him a withering look. ‘Amrita is not some magic potion. It cannot be squeezed from a snake’s head as that fool Demnos believes. It cannot be concocted from eye of newt and toe of frog, quaffed down to give everlasting life. Nothing in nature is so easy.’ She crossed to join Coldhardt, her voice slow and earnest, as if she sought his understanding and approval. ‘My experiments have shown me the truth. Amrita is a purifying substance secreted within the body, by the higher glands. It can only be produced when a perfect balance is achieved between mind and body – a union, if you will, between our basest desires and our highest principles. For each is given meaning by the other.’

For a moment Motti was put in mind of Coldhardt’s statue, the man struggling endlessly with the demon. He saw a dark gleam steal into his mentor’s eyes. It scared him.

‘So
that
is the significance of the serpent and the healer imagery in the legend of Ophiuchus,’ Coldhardt said softly.

‘We have only to look to his constellation to see the endless quest for balance playing out,’ she said. ‘Some look at the pattern of stars and see Ophiuchus bearing a snake torn in two. Others see him presenting a two-headed king snake, a crown adorning each. But to the cultists, the patterns are a nightly reminder that the balance is reached only through meditation, self-denial, fasting and prayer.’

Motti grimaced. ‘If that’s immortality, you can stick it.’

‘Ironic, isn’t it? The only way to live for all time is to have no kind of life at all.’ Samraj looked into Coldhardt’s eyes. ‘But soon, even that will not be an option for the cultists. As the human body grows choked by chemicals and poisoned by pollution, Amrita is produced in ever smaller amounts.’

‘Throw muck into the well and you clog up the water.’

‘That is why the cultists are dying out,’ she said. ‘And why Hela and her fellows have agreed to share their secrets with me alone, so that I might help them.’

‘I thought they’d taken sacred vows and stuff to keep their mouths shut,’ said Motti.

‘Yes, to protect the secrets of the cult. But with the cult itself doomed to certain extinction, such sacrifice seems slightly redundant. Therefore, a faction of acolytes have chosen to break their vows so that their precious religion will not perish.’

‘But you don’t care about that, do you?’ said
Coldhardt. ‘All you want is the Amrita – for yourself.’

‘For the good of all humankind, Nathaniel, naturally.’ She paused, smiled wanly. ‘But my efforts have been in vain. All my attempts to synthesise Amrita … to enhance it and adapt it … They have failed.’

He stared at her. ‘Then that’s it? The end of the road?’

‘So it seemed. But thanks to Yianna, I have found a new path. One that stretches into the shadowlands of history, towards knowledge the civilised world has shied away from.’ Samraj’s smile grew crueller in triumph. ‘In his long, long life, Ophiuchus learned many secrets. And at last I stand on the brink of uncovering the greatest and darkest secret of them all.’

Jonah was fleeing for his life down a foggy street. He couldn’t see who was chasing him, but he knew instinctively they meant to kill him. The buildings all around him were towering, ancient and stooped, full of snakes that hissed and rattled, whispered his whereabouts. Dark shadows detached themselves from the smoke-blackened stone to join his hunters, and Jonah pushed himself harder, faster. He had to find Patch and Motti. They were in trouble and it was his fault, but now an alarm was blaring. An insistent warning.
Get out of here
, it was saying,
before
–

His eyes snapped open, he pushed himself up on his elbows. A dream. That was all. He was in his hotel room in Pisa and the phone was ringing. He squinted at the clock. It was 6.30am. No one knew he was here, and he hadn’t asked for a wake-up call, so who the hell …

The phone wasn’t stopping. Irritated, he grabbed for the receiver. ‘Hello?’

Nothing but silence the other end.

‘Hello?’ he said again.

There was a click as the phone went dead.

He frowned. Replaced the handset. ‘Wrong number,’
he told himself, not believing it for a second.

Now somebody knew exactly where he was.

Cursing, Jonah scrambled out of bed, swiftly slipped on his jeans and denim jacket, trying to clear his head of the shadows in his dream. Coldhardt’s man had dropped him in a quaint, quiet little town called Pontedera as dawn was breaking. From there he had hitched a lift to nearby Pisa, hoping he’d stand out a little less obviously while he tried to decide what to do next.

After a day and a night’s soul-searching he was no closer to an answer. And while he had found a quiet and modest hotel along the Via Roma, not far from the famous leaning tower, he had found no peace of mind.

But had someone now found him?

He bundled down the stairs, crossed the deserted reception. They had his passport behind the desk somewhere – he’d have to come back and collect it later. The door to the street was unbolted. He looked round, suspiciously, then slipped outside.

The street was just as quiet. Jonah walked quickly along the uneven pavement, past the cars that lined the street bumper to bumper, towards the looming layer cake of the tower. Its solid presence, its gravity-defying tilt had proved a strange comfort to him yesterday; he’d sat on the grass in the Field of Miracles and hoped for one himself.

He glanced behind him, unable to shake a feeling of unease – and glimpsed movement. Early-bird tourists, he told himself, having a good poke about the back streets before the place started filling up. But he quickened
his pace nonetheless. He’d seen a police car near the tower yesterday in the shadow of the Duomo; obviously he wasn’t about to go to the law for help but the sight of police might deter anyone from –

Another scuffling noise behind him. He turned, caught a further flash of movement – someone ducking behind a nearby car. Jonah backed away nervously, getting ready to run. Then someone slapped a hand down on his shoulder. He spun round, brought up his fists.

And Tye slapped them back down.

‘Glad we taught you to be paranoid,’ she said. She looked tired. Her eyes were bloodshot and a little puffy. ‘If you’d still been in bed after that call I’d be disappointed.’

Jonah stared, a slow smile spreading over his face. He guessed he should be angry but he was too pleased to see her. ‘What’s going on? How’d you find me?’

‘I knew where you’d been dropped. Guessed you’d have to hand in your fake passport to get a hotel room. So I’ve spent half the night calling every single hotel within thirty miles of Pontedera, asking for Johann Sypher till I got lucky.’

‘And if I’d travelled more than thirty miles?’

‘I would have gone to fifty.’ She glared at him. ‘And beaten the crap out of you when I finally tracked you down.’

‘Lucky I’m lazy then. Did you fly here?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I take it you didn’t come all this way just to say goodbye?’

She shook her head. ‘Afraid you don’t get off the
hook that easy, Jonah Wish.’

‘That’s right. We need you, mate.’

Jonah turned to find Patch standing just behind him. He looked terrible, his pale, angular face bloodied and bruised.

‘What
you
need is a doctor,’ Jonah told him. ‘What the hell’s happened? Where are the others? Are they OK?’

Tye tilted her head back, watched him warily. ‘You mean you actually care?’

‘I …’ Suddenly seeing them like this, he realised in a second what he’d agonised over for hours yesterday. ‘Well, yeah. I s’pose I do.’

‘Good. ’Cause if you didn’t, Patch was gonna have to spike your breakfast so we could smuggle you back to Siena in your sleep.’ Tye’s tiny smile did nothing to allay his growing concerns that something was seriously wrong. ‘And we don’t have time for you to waste sleeping.’

‘You’re now officially the brains of the outfit,’ Patch added.

‘I’m what?’

‘Motti and Con were caught on Serpens property. Coldhardt’s disappeared. The castle’s been trashed.’ Tye shrugged. ‘I know you quit, but like Patch said – if we’re gonna get them back, we need you. We
need
you, Jonah.’

‘Me?’ For what felt like an age, Jonah could only stare at her. ‘But … but you know what happened before. I’ll let you down. I’m bound to.’

She looked at him. ‘You going to let that stop you trying?’

He held her gaze until the long seconds of shock and shadow had passed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I will try.’

Patch put a grateful hand on his back. Tye smiled.

There was no need for more words as they hurried on their way.